In the field of hair dyeing, oxidation dyes have attained substantial importance. The dyeing in this case occurs by reaction of certain developers with certain couplers in the presence of an oxidant. Now as before, colorants that cover the range of natural colors are of particular interest. Until now, the important range of natural shades, particularly the darker nuances, could be covered only by use of complicated mixtures of several different developers and couplers. Normally, combinations of para-phenylenediamines with re-sorcinols, m-aminophenols and m-phenylenediamines were used for this purpose. At the present time, for several reasons, the derivatives of these compounds and not the parent compounds themselves are used in most cases. Because of the complicated compositions required to obtain medium to the dark brown shades, it was desirable to have components capable of producing brown shades without the need for complicated compositions of numerous individual dye components, a 1:1 composition of a single developer and a single coupler being of particular interest.